Ask HN: Have you successfully done a career do-over, and how did you do it?

Get another job. “Stopped being a good hire for other reasons” makes it sounds like you’re experiencing a lot of rejection. Finding a new job is a numbers game, but also the more you search, the better you get at interviewing. Don’t give up, treat your job search like a full time job, be diligent.

I believe this is a time when a lot of software engineers are asking the hard questions about their careers.

Here's why: The technologies have become simpler and the barriers to entry have become low. Once upon a time, if you knew the mainstream languages (C++ and Java) it meant you paid your dues learning the hard stuff. Today, with nodejs becoming mainstream, and the cloud at the backend, developers who come from an "html programming" background can now build scalable and enterprise grade applications without breaking a sweat.

That leaves the "hard core" dev in a little bit of a fix. "Where do I go from here?" The front end is where the complexity is today. Its hard to compete in the AI and machine learning roles when there are phds doing this for ten years who are on the same table. Devops is also simple enough for someone with 3 years of experience of be on top of the game.

Now add to that the fact that the number of devs with 8 years of experience (what I consider the senior dev) grows bigger and bigger each year..

The next slow down I believe will be brutal to our industry.

i am somewhat bemused that this got 38 upvotes in 16 minutes. i have no idea how hacker news' new page works.

This industry is the very definition of career do-over. Every 5 years or so we change our activities. No one writes code or design like 20 years ago. With a career of 50 years, we are all doomed to have to change.

Adapt over time. Don't just jump. Take on new responsibilities. You will find experience crosses many fields. It's a lot about domain knowledge (e.g. financial industry) and we carry a lot of stuff over with us. Never undersell yourself, experience is king. Always be keen on learning, asking questions to younger self. Cross pollinate, experiment and be curious. Too many old devs just corner themselves. They shouldn't, they have a gezillion experiences and it always comes down to a race condition ;)

It's all about latching on to domain expertise. Rarely is a developer a pure technologist, there is always some niche you've become involved in whether it be related to payments or UX or a subset of businesses functions. Assuming you have some meaningful knowledge of something non-technical, you can take that with you into a different area of software development.

I've transitioned across various technical roles by understanding software architecture, business process mapping, master data management, manufacturing, and a slew of other relatively niche areas of domain expertise. I don't think my work was anything unique, I was just aware of the niche components of the projects I worked on and did a good job marketing that knowledge.